Genetics And Detoxification

When a human body has something that it doesn’t want, be it a used hormone, metabolic waste like ammonia, things like salicylates from food, or a chemical from the environment like antimony in flame retardants or mercury in fillings, it has ways to dispose of the toxin. Enzymes in the body process the toxin, flag it for excretion, and excrete it. There is a ton of individual variability in that process, and a lot of it comes down to genetics. For those of us who are interested in genetic testing, hopefully this wiki will make some sense of the alphabet soup and provide some clues for how we can feel better.

The two tests are Dr Amy Yasko’s Nutrigenomic Profile and 23andMe’s Genetic Testing. Both test SNPs, single nucleotide polymorphisms. In Yasko-speak, a ‘-’ means you have the ‘normal’ genetic variant, while a ‘+’ means you may have issues with that enzyme. So, if you’re COMT ++ or +/- you’d want to pay special attention to COMT symptoms and supports, while if you’re COMT –, you’d likely be better off focusing your attention elsewhere.

To make things good and confusing, 23andMe uses a different standard for naming the SNPs, AND sometimes they’re looking at the mirror image of the DNA, so the letters may be completely different. In the table below, we’ve done our best at translating Yasko speak into 23andMe speak. So if you’re looking at the first row, COMT V158M, on your Yasko results a G means you’re COMT –. If you click on the 23andMe name, look at the two letters on the right side of the line once you’re logged in, and compare to the last column in this table below. The (plus) or (minus) has to do with which part of the DNA strand 23andMe is looking at. Ignore it for now. If you see a GG on your results, that means you’re COMT–.

Now that you have a list of which genes to focus on, let’s move on to what to do about them. Yasko’s book is on google books, which gives a rundown of each mutation. Heartfixer has a summary of each gene and how to address it as well. These two are the source of most of the information in the next table.